Online advertising is a multi-billion dollar business. For instance, if a user provides a search query to a search engine, a retailer that offers products or services germane to the search query may wish to advertise to the user, as the advertiser already has an indication of an interest of the user. Online advertising is not limited to search engines, however. For example, a retailer may specialize in offering various brands of electronics devices, and can have a website that can be used in connection with selling electronics. Accordingly, an owner of a particular brand of electronics may wish to advertise to visitors to the website, which generates revenue for the owner of the website.
Frequently, the website host (the content provider) will allow advertisers to have access to all information to be displayed to a user on the web page. In an example, a portion of a website can be dedicated to displaying advertisements, wherein advertising spaces can be auctioned to bidders that will generate a greatest amount of revenue to the content provider. In some situations, however, an advertiser may include code in an advertisement that can cause an entire web page to “break.” Furthermore, some web pages are designed to provide data to a user that is personal in nature, such as portions of user emails, local news, and/or the like. It is undesirable to allow access to an advertiser to an entire web page if personal information of users is contained in the web page.
Various solutions exist with respect to this issue. A first requires that an advertiser only provide very simple data to a host to display advertisements, such as a selectable link, making it easy for the host to determine that the advertiser is not viewing any other data on the web page. These advertisements, however, are typically not aesthetically pleasing (e.g., the advertisements cannot include interactive content, cannot dynamically change shape or location, . . . ). Another option is for a host to set up an iframe in an HTML document. An iframe is a window that acts as an entirely separate web page. Iframes, however, are rigid and can negatively impact performance of a browser, and may still be insecure.